Learn Ikara
The Ngwa writing system
The Basic Concept
Ikara is an alphabet made up of 3 basic tones and 14 basic consonants. These are the "letters", also called ịkara . Tones are a core component of the Ikara writing system—if not the most central part of it. This makes writing Ikara impossible without tone, just as speaking Ngwa is impossible to do without tone.
The Tones
There are three tones, known as olu .
Vowels
There are 11 vowels or ụda olu .
Tones by default provide the "e" vowel sound—as in elu. The remaining 10 vowel sounds are treated as diacritics and placed above the tone to indicate which vowel sound to pronounce.
The Consonants
There are 14 basic consonant, known as ụdahia olu , that are used to represent 24 consonant sounds.
Voiceless vs Voiced
For consonant glyphs with 2 sounds, like , , etc, the first is the default. This is always a voiceless consonant. The second is typically the voiced counterpart, which can be explicitly marked using the diacritic, called ụhụ olu .
The Melodic Progression
Each Ikara character is a block formed by combining tones and consonants. Consonants must be combined with a tone, but tones can either stand alone or be combined with other tones to form a sequence.
This is called ịgụ olu —the melodic progression, and it is similar to what a syllable is in most other languages.
The Diacritics
Ikara recognizes a other linguistic features of Ngwa and uses diacritics or ụhụ ịkara to mark them.
The following diacritics are typically placed above consonants.
nasalization
heave h̃e
thing
aspiration
to glisten ik̃e or ikhe
to tie
palatalization
to abandon ihya
to forestall
labialization
drink ṅwụ
die
Ikara also provides the diacritic for instance where these features co-occur.
dig bỹa
press
The following diacritics are placed below tones
labial-final phoneme
wrestling mgbam
egusi
glottal-final phoneme
today t̃aagh
not blame
Putting It All Together
Ikara characters are strung together in an unbroken sequence to form a "statement", known as okwu .
"have a seat"
"Ngwa people"
Statements are separated from each other by notable spacing.
Ọ dị ẹ? Ọ dị hwe m chọrọ ịka ụka ẹ.
Is he in? There's something I'd like to discuss.
The Ikara writing system does not have a concept of question marks. In Ngwa, questions are encoded in tone progressions, and since Ikara supports full tonal expression in Ngwa, question marks are not used.
Likewise, there is no concept of a "sentence" in Ikara. Ikara relies on notable separation between statements to indicate a pause, just as Ngwa speakers utilize breaks in cadence to indicate pauses and stops in speech.
Since Ikara supports the full cadence of expression in Ngwa, periods are not used.
Congratulations! As an Ngwa speaker, you now know the basics for reading and writing Ikara, and you are now empowered to fully and authentically express yourself in Ngwa without worry of the limitations and the ambiguity imposed by the Latin script.
Numerals in Ikara
Ikara also provides numerals to fully support cardinal, ordinal and arithemtic operations in Ngwa.
The Base 20 System
Unlike the English and modern Igbo base 10 counting system, indigenous Ngwa counting is base 20. Ikara provides the following glyphs for the Ngwa base 20 system.
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
The Place Numbers
Ikara provides another set of numerals for the 8 recognized places in the Ngwa base 20 system.
1s
20s
400s
8,000s
160,000s
3,200,000s
64,000,000s
1,280,000,000s
The place numbers are provided to support a unique feature of Ngwa in which place numbers are explicitly spoken before the noun, before being qualified by an actual numerical value. For example:
A dị we 20 madụ 10.
There are 200 of them.
The Dating System
Ikara also provides support for the native calendar system with two additional glyphs.
2025 10/3/1 14:22:50 (2:22:50 PM)
Congratulations! You now know the complete numeral and dating system provided by Ikara. You can now fully count, discuss quantities and reference any date in the Ngwa traditional calendar.